February Stamp Collecting: A Bit of My History with Stamps

I wanted to start writing about my stamp collections because this month's topic in the Hive Collectors Community is stamps, but I thought my first post should actually be a little bit of a summary of how I got into stamp collecting, and the many different things I collect now, because getting it all together into one single post would take up far more room then makes sense!

So here we go, with the general overview!

Danish stamps I remember from childhood

When I was a kid, lots of people collected stamps. These days the hobby — sadly — seems to have passed into the realm of "nostalgic/esoteric," as far as collecting goes, and the number of stamp collectors has shrunk by maybe 80%.

I started when I was maybe 5-6 years old, as a result of seeing the stamps that arrived on our incoming mail, and then my dad would bring home colorful stamps from the company at which he worked, because they did business with other companies all around the world.

In his perception, he thought stamps would be a great way for me to not only learn about geography, but also to learn about the history and culture of other places. And, of course, a great way to keep me busy with something, rather than "getting into" what the adults were doing.

Some of the first Swedish stamps I remember

Like most beginning collectors I started off collecting “the whole world.”

Of course, there's nothing wrong with that — when you're starting out — but if you're going to pursue stamp collecting as a longer term (of lifelong) hobby it is not a very practical approach. I say this with the hindsight of more than 50 years behind me, because I now know that if you combine all the countries in the world throughout their entire histories of issuing stamps you'd end up with a collection of more than 500,000 items, that would likely cost you in the region of millions of dollars to acquire!

By the time I was about 8 or 9 I had already figured out that it made the most sense to collect stamps from Denmark — which is where I was born and we were living at the time — and stamps from Sweden, which is right next to Denmark and we had many friends and much correspondence going back and forth; and soon after that France, where we would go at least two or three times a year either on holiday, or because of my dad's work taking us there for several months at a time.

Stamps from France, collected during my childhood era. I remember really liking the ones with airplanes!

Some people like to collect stamps that are unused (or mint) as they come from the post office because they are in pristine condition and you can see everything on the little image clearly, while other people prefer to collect stamps that have actually been used to carry the mail and have various postmarks from different parts of the world. My collections have always belonged in the second category because I find the idea of something being used for the purpose for which it was designed to be fascinating... plus you can often see exactly the town a stamp was mailed from.

More Danish stamps. I like how you can see where and often when they were mailed from!

When I was 12 years old, we moved to the south of Spain, at which point I also started to include Spanish stamps as one of the things I enjoyed collecting.

I remained a fairly active stamp collector until the age of 20 when I moved to the USA to go to University. I even belonged to stamp clubs when I lived in Denmark and a stamp club when we lived in Spain.

Once I moved to the United States my interest in stamp collecting — and the time available to pursue it — waned a little bit, perhaps because it was the first time in my life that I had a somewhat active social life and that took precedence.

More recent stamps from Denmark (1990s to 2010)

Unlike many kids who pretty much abandon the hobby when they enter teenage or adulthood and don't pick it back up until they're ready to retire, I started pulling out my stamp collections and getting back into the hobby after graduating University and starting to work. Although I was now living in the USA, I never started collecting US stamps, but instead rekindled my interest and the stamps of Denmark and Sweden.

At roughly the same time, I started my journey into what often is seen as the next phase of becoming a "serious" stamp collector, which is ”specialization.”

But what should we specialize in?

As I mentioned before I like to collect used stamps that actually were used to carry letters, and they have the postmarks from their place of origin.

These Swedish stamps date to 1872 to 1890, and all have very clear postmarks showing where and when they were used on a letter. It is quite a challenge to find them like this, because maybe 1-in-100 are this clear.

So I started collecting postmarks on very old Swedish stamps, because they were beautiful and often readable, then they led me to be able to study towns and villages that don't even exist anymore, or have since been incorporated into bigger cities. To keep the collection under a somewhat manageable size I limited myself to Swedish stamps that had been originally issued before the year 1900.

Of course, one of the things with specialization is that you have now moved far beyond the point of just looking for colorful stamps to arrive in the mail. Which means you are now actually spending money to buy stamps for your collection... and there are lots of options! Back in 1998 I discovered that giant ecommerce site eBay had a large and thriving collector-to-collector market for stamps! So that's where I started adding to my specialized collection.

A couple of stamps showing cats on them. "Thematic" collecting has become quite popular in recent years.

For something completely different, I also started a collection of stamps that depicted cats in some form. We have four cats now and we have had cats for as long as I can remember and they are basically my favorite pet so I thought it would be fun to have a collection of cat stamps. Because cats are so popular as pets all around the world surprisingly many countries have issued stamps featuring cats.

People often ask me whether their stamps have value.

Of course, some stamps do, but they are a minority. Simply being old does not make a stamp rare. It is likely that hundreds of millions of common letter rate stamps were printed were printed even in the 1800s. Which means that a "common stamp" from 1875 is now merely a "common OLD stamp."

Value or not, the bottom line here is to have fun doing what you're doing!

Thanks for coming to visit, and extra thanks to @mipiano for choosing this as the collecting theme for February!

More to come!

How about YOU? Have you ever collected stamps? Do you still collect? Do you have another collecting interest? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!

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Created at 2025.02.10 13:20 PST
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